Robots Do it Better?

ChatGPT is a distraction. Teaching writing the old-fashioned way will save America from itself.

Last weekend, I was sitting at a coffee shop waiting for a friend when I noticed the teenager sitting at the table next to me was using ChatGPT to complete his Spanish homework. One by one he typed in the questions from the worksheet (Dónde está mi coche?) and then typed in the answer he needed (My car is near the hospital) and ChatGPT instantaneously spit out the answer in Spanish. 

In 5 minutes he was done and then he watched a music video.

Dumbass, I thought.  

But I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about his teacher, who I suspected would collect that work and return it with a check plus or muy bueno or whatever without having any idea that the student cheated, or if they had an inkling so, wouldn’t care. Yes, it’s entirely possible his teacher had devised a grading system that weighted homework far less than quizzes and tests, but in my years of confiscating work from huddled groups of students in the cafeteria and then later asking their teacher for work’s rationale given how eminently copyable the work was, that is rarely the case. 

And that is because too many students and teachers enter into an unspoken treaty we might call “mutually assured mediocrity” wherein as long as students basically follow directions and do the work that the teachers assign, teachers don’t ask too many questions. (It is this treaty that also gives us powerpoints, worksheets, stale curriculum, and group work for the sake of group work.) 

To be fair, teaching is intellectually, physically and emotionally exhausting to a degree few if any other jobs are, and it is that fact alone which explains why on the one hand teacher happy hours often resemble the first night of Rumspringa and on the other why even stupendous teachers allow their standards to occasionally slip.

Maintaining high expectations requires vigilance and stamina, and, what’s more, it is often a crashing bore.

Who among us hasn’t whispered fuck it as the next episode of Home Improvement Stranger Things autoplays and decided to wing the next day’s lessons? Who among us hasn’t been so tuckered out by the hamster wheel of planning-teaching-grading that, rather than grade the pile of student work on our desk, we’ve simply dropped it all in the trash? Few forms of malfeasance are as fun, and “A for effort” is more of a lifeboat for teachers than students.

So I get why teachers, noble thieves as they are, are also great corner-cutters and often gullible early adopters, eager to jump for any app or acronymic idea that promises to reduce their workload while achieving the same (or better!) results. 

Which is exactly why ChatGPT is a blessing for education. 

Now, most of the responses to this artificial intelligence tool have ranged from fatalism¹ — “AI is the End of Writing;” “The End of High-School English” — to chipper accommodation — “No, ChatGPT Is Not the End of High School English. But Here’s The Useful Tool It Offers Teachers;” “Don’t Ban ChatGPT: Use It As a Teaching Tool” — to breathtaking ignorance about how students learn and what students need — “Socrates Never Wrote a Term Paper;” “Beneath the AI Hype;” “Don’t Ban Chatbots in Classrooms -- Use Them to Change How We Teach.” 

But there’s another response to ChatGPT that I haven’t really heard anyone else say: just ignore it. 

All arguments about what happens at school are essentially arguments about the purpose of school. So it seems critical to point out that in this year of our lord 2023 in these United States of America one of schools’ most basic responsibilities is to be both a citadel and a monastery — a place whose values and practices are a both a shield and a rebuke to the erosion of manners, common sense and mental health hastened by the rapid social, technological and environmental change that has not only normalized public displays of anger, idiocy and Crocs, but also inured us to the shameful rates of depression, suicide, addiction, loneliness and gun violence that would require you to be willfully dumb or stony-hearted not to be seriously worried about, or in the very least recognize are the dreadful consequences of the modern, materialistic, convenience-obsessed society we have built for ourselves.  

And though it is unfortunate that it has become passé to trumpet such old-fashioned virtues as diligence, kindness, humility, and erudition (among others), most people would quickly agree that those are precisely the traits they desire for their own children and welcome in their neighbors and would certainly appreciate a greater abundance of at airports. But what are we to do when the larger popular and political culture aggrandizes the exact opposite of those values and treats those who embody or promote them with contempt? What are we to do when bitching about manners and punctuality elicits eye rolls at the Christmas party? When questioning why any toddler needs an iPad or whether TikTok is the new Phillip Morris exposes you as, at best, a killjoy and, at worst, a prig?

It has been left to schools, then, to batten down the hatches and double down on those practices we know best improves students’ academics and in turn cultivates their character.

And it is educators, then, who must stand as sturdy and solemn as a sentry at the schoolhouse door and hold up their hands to say No thank you to every gewgaw and “innovation” and corrosive distraction the outside world tries to smuggle in under the auspices of equipping kids with “21st century skills” and for which we have seen time and time and time again have not, in fact, made our jobs of teaching children easier, and have not, in fact, made those children more literate or numerate. In some cases, they have had precisely the opposite effect.

It is teachers, then, who must continue to teach writing. But the old fashioned way.

To be sure, this is not easy (it never has been), and it will only get harder as AI continues to advance, and though ChatGPT is simply the latest iteration of a technology that both complicates teaching and makes us ponder the whole point of it all, it is not, as has been suggested, a death blow for that lovely old biddy, the 5-paragraph essay, and nor is it something we need to adapt to, like rising sea levels or a new missing limb. 

What’s more, shoehorning ChatGPT into our instruction for the novelty of it or because it makes things easier will not “transform” or “revolutionize” teaching, as many gleeful but naive educators have declared. Rather, it will simply fool teachers into believing they can sidestep the meat and potatoes of good writing instruction and achieve the same results when in reality they’d be depriving students of the academic and character-forming benefits that slowly accrete from the mastery and refinement of tiny, necessarily tedious skills like where commas go, or how to cite evidence, or when the word “famished” is better than “hungry” (and when it’s not).

It’s the journey, not the destination and in the wise words of Daisy Christodoulou: “if we want students to have advanced skills, they cannot leapfrog fundamental skills.” 

So, let’s ignore ChatGPT.

Let’s continue to do what we know works best in writing instruction, no matter the age you teach and no matter the subject. (Yes, all teachers are also English teachers.)

Make students write every day in class, both for learning and for assessment, for low stakes and for high stakes, for short periods and for long periods. Ensure that writing is mostly in response to rich texts that students have carefully read and talked about. (Them, not you.) Make sure some writing is timed, but ensure most is process (i.e. plan, draft, revise.) Write prompts that span genres, grow increasingly complex, and which build off previously taught skills. Give students scaffolds² that you eventually remove. Assign more writing than you could possibly read. Give individual and class-wide feedback, but Jesus God do not write comments on even half of what they write. Conference. Use rubrics and checklists. Teach students to proofread and then refuse to accept anything that isn’t. Use models to teach, as well as direct instruction, and when possible, write every single thing the students do. 

Learning how to write well is the single most difficult academic skill students learn in school. It also just so happens to be the best, most efficient, and most scalable method for engaging students in rigorous work that cultivates thinking and, yes, improves their character. 

If schools insist on teaching writing, and teaching it the right way, it might just save us from ourselves.

Above image: Vince Crash Dummy Costume Head, 1990s, National Museum of American History.

1. Weird to me that all of the arguments made against the teaching of writing are written. Arguments against the futility of learning how to write well would be much more persuasive if they were painted or danced.

2. In edujargon, a “scaffold” is a resource that helps students achieve a task. For writing, one might be sentence starters (“I agree with the author when she writes…”) or a pre-made outline.